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 WORKING AT CAROLINA


* * Next athletic director to help UNC realize ‘great potential’
* * King selected as journalism school dean
* * Gray recommended as VC for finance and administration
* * Meares’ charge: Match donors’ goals with Carolina’s needs
* * Human Resources launches wellness initiative with focus on mind, body, balance, community


Next athletic director to help UNC realize ‘great potential’

A 13-member search committee has hired Gainesville, Fla.-based Carr Sports Associates Inc. to help identify a new athletic director to replace longtime AD Dick Baddour.

In July, Baddour announced plans to accelerate his retirement so the new athletic director could hire Carolina’s next head football coach.

In his charge to the search committee at its inaugural meeting last month, Chancellor Holden Thorp told members they faced a daunting task.

Both Baddour and his predecessor, John Swofford, each served Carolina for many years, and each helped to build an athletics program that is considered one of the most comprehensive and competitive in the country.

“If there was a Hall of Fame for athletic directors, these two guys would be in it,” Thorp said.

 Trustee Lowry Caudill, who also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the chemistry department, chairs the search committee, which includes representatives of the Educational Foundation Inc., trustees, University faculty and administrators, athletics department staff members and successful former student-athletes.

“I feel very confident knowing all of you are here to help us do this and I am  especially confident in Lowry Caudill, who I have worked with for such a long time,” Thorp said.

“This is an important moment in the history of the University. We are in a difficult time, but we are also in a time of great potential. This process will help us realize that potential.”

The athletic director will oversee what is considered to be one of the nation’s most successful college sports programs. Nearly 800 student-athletes compete in 28 men’s and women’s varsity sports.

“We need someone who completely understands the importance of all 28 sports at Carolina,” Thorp added. “For the right candidate, this will be an extremely attractive feature of the job.”

Faculty Chair Jan Boxill added a qualification: When the next athletic director stands before the Faculty Council for the first time, that person should be someone faculty members will be glad is there.

“It has to be a person we can trust,” she said.

Search committee member Martina Ballen said it was important to remember in the midst of current controversies that Carolina has a special culture and tradition that took decades to build, and that the next athletic director needs to recognize and preserve. Ballen is senior associate athletic director and chief financial officer of the athletics department .

There are some serious issues that need attention, but the next athletic director needs to “understand we are not broken,” said Ballen, a 25-year veteran of the athletics department.

The committee met again last week and was scheduled to meet today (Sept. 14), and hopes to recommend a new AD this fall.



King selected as journalism school dean

King
King

Susan King, vice president for external affairs for Carnegie Corporation of New York, will be recommended to become the next dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, pending approval by the Board of Trustees.

Chancellor Holden Thorp and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Bruce Carney selected King following a national search. If approved, King’s appointment will be effective Jan. 1. She also would hold the title John Thomas Kerr Distinguished Professor.

“As the digital age brings swift changes to the way we communicate, the journalism school’s curriculum is continuously updated so that our students will not only have the skills they need but also be able to lead the news industry into the future,” Thorp said.

“Susan King’s impressive work as an architect of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education shows her ability to prepare a new generation of communicators to seize the opportunities of the fast-moving multimedia era.”

Carolina is one of a dozen universities participating in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative’s News21 experimental reporting program launched by King. UNC won more than 40 national and international awards for its News21 contribution, Powering a Nation (see story on page 1).

Prior to Carnegie, King worked nearly five years in the U.S. Department of Labor as the assistant secretary for public affairs and as the executive director of the Family and Medical Leave Commission.

Her journalism career included stints with ABC, CBS and NBC News. At CBS, she was a correspondent for Walter Cronkite. King was also an independent journalist reporting for CNN and ABC Radio News. She was a local television news anchor at stations in Buffalo, N.Y., and Washington, D.C. She has hosted the “Diane Rehm Show” and “Talk of the Nation” for National Public Radio.

King has a bachelor’s degree in English from Marymount College in Tarrytown, N.Y., and she earned her master’s degree in communications from Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn.

King will replace media historian Jean Folkerts, who stepped down June 30 after five years as dean to join the faculty to teach courses, conduct research and mentor students. Dulcie Straughan, former senior associate dean of the journalism school, has served as the interim dean since July 1.

Jim Dean, dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School, chaired the campus advisory committee that led the search for the new dean. Carney thanked Straughan and Dean for their efforts.



Gray recommended as VC for finance and administration

Gray
Gray

Chancellor Holden Thorp has recommended Karol Kain Gray, vice president for finance and administration at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y., to become Carolina’s new vice chancellor for finance and administration.

If the appointment is approved by the Board of Trustees in September, it will become effective Dec. 1.

Gray would succeed Richard Mann, who announced his retirement this year but agreed to stay on until his replacement was named. Gray also succeeded Mann when he left Stony Brook to come to Carolina in 2006.

“Karol Gray has distinguished herself as an exceptionally qualified administrator and chief financial officer at Stony Brook University,” Thorp said. “She brings more than three decades of experience at a distinguished public university to Carolina at a time when we face major budget challenges and changes to how we run the campus. We’re very fortunate to have attracted a candidate of her stature to join our administrative team.”

As vice chancellor for finance and administration, Gray would serve as the University’s principal finance and business officer and report to  the chancellor.

She has 33 years of experience at Stony Brook, where she is responsible for developing and implementing administrative policies in addition to enhancing fiscal services.

Before taking Stony Brook’s top finance position, Gray worked her way up steadily at the university as a financial analyst, chief accountant, controller and associate vice president for finance and administration. She has also served as a liaison to the governance and finance committees of the Stony Brook University Hospital.

Gray graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Hofstra University. Her candidacy resulted from a national search led by a committee chaired by Bill McCoy, former vice chair of BellSouth Corp., vice president for finance for General Administration and former interim chancellor at Carolina.

“We’re grateful to the search committee members and Bill McCoy for all of their work in making this search successful,” Thorp said.



Meares’ charge: Match donors’ goals with Carolina’s needs

Meares

Mark Meares majored in English – with an emphasis on creative writing – when he was an undergraduate at Carolina in the 1970s.

He eventually returned to Carolina in 1998 to join the University Advancement staff as associate director of Corporate and Foundation Relations and assumed his current position as director three years later.

Although he did not know it at the time, he said, in many ways the job would require him to become a student again. But this time around, he added, there was only one subject to study: “Carolina.”

After 13 years of University service, his mastery of that subject earned Meares a 2011 C. Knox Massey Distinguished Service Award.

In particular, Meares was cited for his work orchestrating the Innovate@Carolina Campaign, a $125 million drive aimed at making Carolina a world leader in launching university-born ideas for the good of society.

Nominated by two deans and three associate provosts and deans, Meares was praised for his tireless work ethic and an esprit de corps second to none.

Meares said he considers himself lucky to have a job that requires that he learn so much about the University and the great work happening here. It is the value of that work, he added, that adds meaning to his own work.

“It is really important for me to say that it is the content of this University – the quality of the people we have here and the work they do – that makes what I do possible,” Meares said. “It is not me. I just have to be out there, keeping my eyes open.”

Going the extra mile
It could be said that Meares has always been a keen observer of his surroundings.

He hails from Maryville, Tenn., in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. It was a place where men of faith took up snake handling to demonstrate their faith in God’s word.

His first year at Carolina, Meares wrote about the snake handlers for an English course.

To research the subject, he drove up winding dirt roads to Newport, Tenn., where he hoped to witness a Sunday night service delivered by Rev. Liston L. Pack, a noted snake handler. Meares found out about Pack when Time magazine wrote about Pack’s brother dying after he drank strychnine.

“Rev. Pack was quoted in Time that his brother must have died because he was a non-believer down deep,” Meares said.

During the service, Meares sensed he had caught Pack’s attention.

“Everybody was getting excited and throwing their arms up and waving and Liston Pack started saying, ‘I believe tonight there are some non-believers in church with us and I am very, very fearful that something terrible is going to happen to them.’ After I heard that, I threw my arms up and started waving, too.”

A desire to give back
Meares draws upon the writing and communication skills he learned at Carolina to do his work, but the range of sales experience he gained working for Village Companies in Chapel Hill has proven to be invaluable as well.

He worked for the company for more than 14 years, serving as general manager of Village Printing, publisher of The Leader Magazine, and general manager and executive vice president of The Village Advocate, Village Printing and the Triangle  Pointer magazine.

In 1995, he joined the Hudson Belk department store chain as marketing director and was promoted to vice president a year later. Over time he became increasingly involved in public service and began serving on the boards of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Public School Foundation.

It was also during this period that he began thinking about what he could do to give back to Carolina. To find out, he scheduled coffee to discuss volunteering with Margie Crowell, a friend who then was associate vice chancellor of university development.

“She told me, ‘We have some jobs open. Maybe one of them would be right for you,’” he said.

Making connections
Until that point, selling is what Meares had always done and was what he knew.  At Carolina, his objective was not selling the University, but advancing it. He did that by raising money to pay for things that could make it better.

One constant in both professions is the importance of knowing your customers’ needs, Meares said.

His job is to match the foundation to the University department or faculty member whose work touches on those areas the foundation and the University are interested in advancing, he said.

The Ford Foundation, for instance, is interested in racial equality, Meares said.

“OK, what do we have going on at Carolina that it might be interested in? Well, we have the Civil Rights Center founded by Julius Chambers, one of the greatest civil rights lawyers in the history of this country,” he said.

“It is easy to see that there may be some things they can mutually help each other accomplish. Our job over here is to try to bring those two groups together and get them talking. Our goal is fundraising, but the way we do that is to manage and nurture these relationships in a way that allows them to find a good fit.”

Stephen Farmer, who heads undergraduate admissions, cited the central role Meares played in developing a proposal to the Jack Kent Cook Foundation that would create the Carolina Student Transfer Excellence Program.

The first of its kind in the state, the program has enabled low- to moderate-income students in community colleges to transfer to Carolina.

“Mark has been a tireless and extremely effective advocate of the University’s mission to serve the people of North Carolina, the nation and the world,” Farmer said.

But Meares said it is a privilege to have a job that requires him to learn something new about a place he will always cherish.

 “What I love most about this job is that it requires of me that I am out there talking to faculty members to find out what they have been discovering,” Meares said.

“I am lucky enough to get all of this intellectual stimulation while trying to make those connections.”



Human Resources launches
wellness initiative with focus on
mind, body, balance, community


 

This fall, employees can learn about wellness in a new way through the launch of Work Well, Live Well, the University’s new employee wellness program. A four-week celebration will begin Sept. 27, with each week focused on one of the four Work Well, Live Well components – mind, body, balance and community.

“To reinvigorate the campus commitment to health and well-being, the UNC wellness program has been given a totally new look,” said Ashley Nicklis, senior director for benefits and work/life programs in the Office of Human Resources. “Work Well, Live Well is designed to focus on the whole person to be as inclusive as possible.”

The four-week celebration will offer employees a variety of ways to explore the program’s four components. Challenges for each week will incorporate activities designed to promote physical activity, healthy living and improved well-being. Three basic challenges will be posted each week, motivating employees to greater overall wellness, regardless of fitness level.

“In addition, each week will feature an all-star challenge, which requires a bit more effort and a commitment of time and energy to achieve,” Nicklis added.

Those who accomplish at least five basic challenges each week can present their challenge record at Employee Appreciation Day on Oct. 21 to be eligible for hourly wellness prizes. Employees who accomplish all four all-star challenges by the end of the celebration will be entered into a separate drawing for one of two grand prizes – a one-year membership to Campus Recreation or a new custom-built bicycle.

The challenge lists, as well as a challenge record to track participation, are available on the Work Well, Live Well website, go.unc.edu/Ye37J, along with a comprehensive list of resources relating to health, fitness, finances and community involvement. In addition, the Work Well, Live Well website is available as a resource for any University departments wishing to develop wellness initiatives or projects of their own.

Look for further components to be added as the semester progresses, including a wellness calendar to keep employees informed of campus activities and wellness opportunities.

To get tips, news and updates about wellness, visit the website to sign up for the Work Well, Live Well listserv. For more information, email benefits@unc.edu.

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INSIDE THE PRINT EDITION:
September 14, 2011

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